I Lost to Flappy Bird (and Fine Print) at a Lawton Walmart

My sisters and I were back-to-school shopping at the Walmart on 67th Street in Lawton when I decided to wander into the arcade.

I plopped down on the motorcycle seat to rest my feet and overheard a family at one of the machines muttering: “This thing is rigged.”

They weren’t wrong.

We all know crane games are designed to fail — weak claws, oversized prizes, impossible angles. But some of the other machines looked tempting. The Flappy Bird button game caught my eye, and I thought, “I was good at this on my phone. Surely I can get through 15 tunnels.”

Walmart arcade games charge more than $1 if using a credit/debit card.

I got stuck at 14. My sisters tried their luck too, only to face the same frustration. We laughed it off, assuming the games were just another arcade scam.

But then I noticed something worse.

Every machine had a bright sign that read: “$1.00 to Play.” Yet when I tapped my card to pay for my sister’s turn, I saw the charge: $3.10 per swipe. That meant every game had been quietly draining us for triple the cost.

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Suddenly, beating Flappy Bird didn’t feel like the real challenge. The toughest game in the Lawton Walmart arcade was spotting the fine print before our wallets lost.